Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1544300
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 35 nominated and … they both must be present at the final mix. One of our supervisors was not. That didn't make it any less painful because the work this individual provided was great. It absolutely merited an Oscar along with Dave White and I. SSS: Wow! That is absolutely huge! So, your second Oscar was for Dune. That was your baby. That was your vision. Those were your ideas. MM: I'm really proud of Dune: Part One. It represents the apotheosis of so many of my sound-as-storytelling ideas. It's also important to recognize Denis Villeneuve, because he is one of the only directors I've ever worked with who understood failure as a necessary part of our process. He gave us gobs of time when we started to experiment … and fail. So, when we started post production on Dune: Part One (as we had on Blade Runner 2049), we got six weeks where we could go off and try anything. No direction. Do whatever we wanted, follow any crazy lead, and that's exactly what we did. We would try nutty ideas. "Hey, you want to record some monks?" That didn't work out. "Hey, how about some humpback whales?" Ah, that didn't work out. So, we would follow leads, and some would turn into good ideas, and some would be discarded, and Denis received all of the them with the same attitude; either "that's great, I love it" or "that's great, I see where you're going, it's not right for the film but I see why you tried it. Let's try this direction." I'll never forget the first design review session with Denis, BIG failure. The challenge was to make the sound of the Sand Worms, and without any direction, he wanted to see what we would come up with. He didn't want to impose an idea. Theo Green, my design partner on Dune: Part One, and I went in the Godzilla direction, meaning big worm, big sound. Big worm comes out, and it's got to go RRRRRRRRR (making the sound of a giant creature roar) like that, right? Denis came in for the first review session after our weeks of experimentation. We played these big, roaring monsters echoing across the desert and he said, "that's all wrong." It's not the sound itself. The idea is wrong. In the legend, in the lore of Arrakis, the worms are revered creatures like gods, because they are the source of survival for the Fremen who look out for them. So, this cannot be a frightening sound. Back to the drawing board. Three weeks later, something very different got presented, but that would be the process with Denis. We'd fail. We'd present, okay, here's Mark lecturing in Portugal c. 2024 Mark Mangini c. 1964